DS: These “actual conditions” we're speaking of, to extend the abstraction, have to include the material conditions of production and reception. But I think too there's a metaphysical process equally important for our conception of language and the world. Walter Benjamin brings up a distinction between bourgeois linguistic theory and mystical linguistic theory, neither for him measuring up to his own understanding of language as both material and other. That relation between material and other, the known and the unknown, is the place where poetry begins to function. I've recently begun to feel that filmmakers are writing much better critical prose on their craft than poets. Nathaniel Dorsky's Devotional Cinema, recently published by Tuumba Press from a talk he gave at Princeton on religion and cinema, considers the function of the image in art as that hinge between matter and non-material content, the expression of which in film is peculiarly difficult. Let me quote here from Dorsky's book because it's such a careful if speculative consideration of the material aspects of his art:
On close examination, even our vision appears to be intermittent, which explains why, in film, pans often feel artificial or forced. This stems from the fact that one never pans in real life. In truth, when we turn our heads we don't actually see a graceful continuum but a series of tiny jump-cuts, little stills joined, perhaps, by infinitesimal dissolves. Thus our visual experience in daily life is akin to the intermittence of cinema.
Intermittence penetrates to the very core of our being, and film vibrates in a way that is close to this core. It is as basic as life and death, existence and nonexistence. My own instinct is that the poles of existence and nonexistence alternate at an extremely fast speed, and that we float in that alternation. We don't experience the nonexistence, the moments between existence; there is no way to perceive these moments as such. But accepting their presence aerates life, and suffuses the ‘solid' world with luminosity.”
What do you make of writers like Benjamin and Dorsky who scrutinize material production and reception, but also tend speculative, if not outright occult, notions of language, image and, well, for lack of a better word, life?
AG: That's a good description of the conflicting — and almost contradictory — attitudes toward language and toward image that Benjamin and Dorsky, respectively, combine in their work (with Benjamin, moreover, a philosopher of the image, and Dorsky an image-maker with a keen awareness of language). According to Benjamin, human language is fundamentally Adamic: meaning, it names. However, the function of naming isn't primarily to designate objects; rather (and here I'm skipping along rather quickly through his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which I assume you're referring to), it reveals a tension between the finite and the infinite, the expressible and the inexpressible (substituting “seeing” for “naming” puts us very close to what Dorsky's saying about “intermittence”). For Benjamin, this tension hinges on a conception of language as translation. But there's a Platonic / mystical component to his theory that pushes it away from material phenomena and toward a transcendental realm, whether that of mental processes embedded within language or a notion of the divine (more Platonic in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his Trauerspiel book and more theological in “On Language as Such”).
The part of Benjamin's theory about language not merely being a naming of objects, with its accompanying idea of speaking the unspeakable, was attractive to me ten years ago when I was (co-)editing apex of the M . In fact, it served as an important element in the theory of poetic language we were trying to articulate in our editorials, and which we attempted to signify with the phrase “radical transparency.” As we imagined it then, a radically transparent language was one that aimed at legibility and representation (in the face of avant-garde strategies of alienation and willful opacity), but that was ultimately objectless in orientation. Unlike Benjamin, we didn't anchor it in a sense of the divine, as much as some people misread us as doing. (Though a Derridean would say that all signification is rooted in the transcendental. Do they say that anymore?) However, it's not a theory of language — Benjamin's or apex of the M 's — that I feel any real affinity for these days.
My thinking about language, including poetic language, tends more to parallel VN Voloshinov's / Bakhtin's notion that language is an arena of social and cultural utterance and struggle. This approach to language absolutely allows for play, indeterminacy, absurdity, heteroglossia. . . . In fact, it calls for them as forms of subversion, as Bakhtin / Voloshinov's “dialogic” theory of language argues. In contrast with what might at first glance appear to be circumscriptive Marxist theories of language (echoes of Oppen and '30s proletariat lit?), I find mystical and quasi-religious theories of language to be the ones that leave so much of life out, particularly in their widespread adoption — mostly unconsciously (i.e., un[self]critically) — within poetry. For instance, I'm very skeptical of poetry that can't or won't use the word “McDonald's” in it, which isn't, of course, to equate McDonald's with life. Far from it. In many ways, McDonald's is a death industry. But so is much of contemporary life.
In retrospect, Benjamin is looking more and more like one of the major critics of the 20th century, but his theory of language probably doesn't play a big part in this. Rather, as such a scrupulous bourgeois bohemian, Benjamin presciently analyzed so many different aspects of our current bourgeois bohemian culture. For what is the majority of mass media culture these days but a form of bourgeois bohemianism, at least that aspect of it aimed at people from the age of 21 up to aging baby boomers?
DS: No, I agree, if you can't get McDonald's or Michael Jackson in a poem, you're not doing your job. And this is all a tricky business, so to say. Somehow a menage-a-trois twixt Benjamin, Voloshinov and Bakhtin would be a good start. I remember thinking years ago when I started out that poetry was supposed to be about important and serious stuff. Then when I met Tom Clark he'd talk seriously about all aspects of popular culture. Other poets I met also had this marvelous range. Ken Irby, who I saw last weekend, remarked how Robert Duncan read everything from the most obtuse metaphysics to the trashiest novels. So it seems a theory of language, which somehow, when you break it down, leaves the self exposed in that process of perception and transmission, runs into problems the social can't always deal with, nor should it. At the same time, just because you've thought about language and realize all this transcendent stuff, it doesn't give you the right (or ability) to step out of this world of grease and pop stars. The one thing though that never seems to go away, for me, is that thin divide between what we know and don't.
AG: I, too, once thought poetry should mostly deal with high-minded and / or literary matters. Around the time I began to realize the serious limitations to this point of view, I read separate interviews with bell hooks and Bernadette Mayer in which both of them encouraged writers and critical thinkers to read everything — from Lacan to Car and Driver magazine (still following this advice, I spent three hours late last night reading the November 2003 issue of Vanity Fair ).
But I want to return briefly to what I mentioned in my previous response, specifically, that I've never found much in a metaphysical theory of language that a more socially-oriented approach can't also provide: whether it's the paranormal, gaps within perception (“intermittence”), a flicker at the edge of things, or — especially — ”that thin divide between what we know and don't.” Which isn't to dismiss a metaphysical sensibility, but maybe to fold it into the social, as you suggest. I should also mention, in partial response to a reader who sent to your blog an insightful comment regarding the first section of our conversation posted there, that what I'm describing as a social-material linguistic theory is one at the heart of feminist understandings of language, culture, politics, intersubjectivity, and what the French-Israeli visual artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger terms the “matrixial,” which is a nonhierarchical, feminine / maternal (as opposed to patriarchal / phallic) borderspace of encounter between co-emerging subjects that is hidden within the everyday social world. For Lichtenberg Ettinger, the work of art is a “trans-subjective-object” that exists as a relationship between that to which art gives witness (though she prefers the word “wit[h]ness”) and its viewer / reader. As the curator Catherine de Zegher pointed out in a recent issue of Artforum , the relationship between art and audience proposed by Lichtenberg Ettinger and other contemporary “feminist” artists is quite different from the modernist strategy of alienation. Translating this into recent avant-garde poetry, I'd say that the standard method of employing Brechtian-styled “alienation effects” in order to compel interactions between a text and its reader has always made me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, most immediately because this type of writing tends not to be very dialogical at all, but extremely monological, almost autistic — or at least solipsistic — in certain instances.
DS: Here's the comment that the reader you mention recently posted at my site.
The success of the feminist revolution never came up. Two men earnestly discussing the implications of parenthood, able to continue thinking abstractly and coherently while caring for toddlers 8+ hours a day. I'm curious about what allowed this to happen. Did the work of feminist artists / poets make a difference in disabling pieces of the patriarchy? Are there lessons here for the current task at hand?
AG: I don't know about you, but since Sophie's birth I'm lucky if I get two or three hours of lucidity a day, and that tends to be around midnight, after the household has gone to sleep, and I'm at my desk popping handfuls of chocolate covered espresso beans. I need to keep reminding myself that there were plenty of times in my life prior to becoming a parent when I only had a few hours of lucidity a day. However, they tended to be more in the afternoon, when I was fresher. People have been urging me to consider getting up early in the morning to write (before the baby wakes, Sylvia Plath style [!]); but even when I was a kid, I was never a morning person. So it's not going to happen for me now; though from what you've told me, I gather that your most lucid time is in the morning. I also noticed that most of the emails I receive from you are in the morning, whereas mine tend to be sent late at night (when I'm not stealing time at work).
It can be a struggle — a mostly positive struggle — to find time for one's own writing, no doubt about it; and as much as Kristin and I try to share parental responsibilities, I know it's much more of a struggle for her. We've learned to cut out certain activities in an effort to regain vanished hours. Watching TV is now at a bare minimum. The magazines I subscribe to tend to be read a little less closely. Obviously, working around an infant's schedule means more selective socializing. As a result, one picks up time here and there that used to heedlessly slip away. And even if there are days when I don't get a lot of my own work done, since Sophie's been born I have yet to have the experience where I say to myself, “Where did the day go?” or, “I can't believe January's over already,” which were common enough sentiments in more carefree years. I attribute this change — which I assume isn't permanent — to what I mentioned earlier about how much an infant keeps one focused on the present.
What does this have to do with feminism? It's a complex topic to address, but I do know that feminism taught me about ethics in a way no other critical discourse did — including those, such as Kantian or Levinasian philosophy, that purported to be rigorous examinations of the ethical condition. And I think one of the primary reasons why feminism works as an ethics is because of its focus on the everyday. Feminism was really the first to argue that one makes constant political decisions in the home, in the workplace, in the social sphere, and, as you point out, in language. As such, it's also part of a larger civil rights movement. Does our ability to speak about these matters — especially male parenting — point to feminism's success, as the reader you quote suggests? Is it because of some previous dismantling of patriarchy? Patriarchy's grip is tenacious, fanatical. But there's nothing like parenting to make one not want to repeat certain behaviors and actions of one's own parents, however difficult it is to unlearn ingrained responses. If the parenting one received was structured by patriarchy (as mine fundamentally was), then there might be an inclination to resist this, while at the same time perhaps taking other feminist concerns for granted. It's very easy for both men and women today to take feminism for granted, and I know progressive young women from my generation and younger who aren't even sure if they want to be called feminists.
DS: Yes, I'm a morning lucidity kind of guy. But really, that's because of the schedule Hoa and I have made around her work hours. I'm free to do my thing until early afternoon when I take over with Keaton. During his first year though I worked a graveyard shift as a security guard, so the wee hours were my periods of most productive work. I prefer late night for the quiet, as you mention. But after a while, it takes more than espresso beans to survive that. And I've never had trouble getting up in the morning.
It gets easier as the infant grows into a toddler. You're able to reclaim some time for yourself as the child becomes more independent for short stretches. I carry notebooks around for moments when Keaton is absorbed by something and I can write. Reading is more difficult and fractured, but certainly I get more done now than I did a couple of years ago. I'm a bit nervous about how time will change yet again with the arrival in a few weeks of our second babe.
The ethical, day-to-day influence of feminism is important, as you say. Our roles, certainly yours and mine in our current situations, have been influenced by it. Around children you see quickly how power relations are formed and how they play out. To treat each other with decency is an extraordinarily complex thing, it turns out. Feminism's influence on child rearing is crucial too, and valuable for the inclusion of men in the practice of raising kids, once solely women's domain. I don't think my father, for example, ever changed a diaper in his life. I've learned in the last couple of years with Keaton a kind of provisory existence, where I read each situation according to the context and demands of that environment, mood, need, etc. It's exhausting but it's also liberating in that I've come to attend each relationship as vital and essentially dynamic. It's much like poetry and language. You learn not to impose your will on someone or something, but to listen, feel through it, make subtle negotiations. And failure's also part of that package. There are days that just suck.
The ways women now approach the raising of children are different too. Extended breast-feeding is much more accepted now (the World Health Organization now recommends at least 2 years). By the way, right here, in all fairness, I have to say that Hoa has done a tremendous amount of research on childhood issues. Much more than I have done. She picks up the practical info on herbal medicines, whether or not to vaccinate and other basic approaches and information. She's in direct conversation with a supportive network of women and can quickly find answers to our questions. In that sense, things have still not changed that much. I don't know of any fathering communities, at least none I'd want to be a part of. So that brings up basic differences of social commitment and exchange.
It's hard for me to examine broader power structures in abstract terms like patriarchy. I don't think the capacity for evil is exclusive to one sex. And expressions of power are divers, complicated and not always visible in ways that are obvious. In terms of cultural evolution, Sauer and others claim that men were domesticated much later than women, and that domestication conflicts continue to be an issue. So there's the whole psycho-pathology of the species still transforming, adjusting in a short time, maybe a million years or so, to agriculture, trade, complex societies and the like coming to the present. Our tools are advanced, our critical tools as well. But our ability to raise children and interact with each other has roots in our pre-history. That hasn't changed. Our psyches are tenuous within the complex social environments we inhabit. We may not worry about where the next meal's coming from, but there are basic insecurities: am I raising my child right? how should I respond to this fucked-up situation? And in this post-metaphysical, global situation, fueled by an expanding technocracy, we're living now within biopolitical frameworks that code and trace our every move. Modernity demands a certain social, technological, and political conformity; and the old male / female roles fail to deal with that.Finding ways to live as a global subject while also preserving individual creative practices is challenging, to say the least. Our instincts recoil at mind-killing conformist patterns of coercion and discourse while at the same time we get to work on time, pay our bills, and do countless other tasks that are essential to the continuation of the post-industrial West. Feminism, as I understand it, helps inform the ways men and women can work together to push the boundaries of meaning within these technological and systematic spaces. And in the absence of broad political movements or opposition, this more subtle, day-to-day engagement with our environments seems one of the few possibilities left to us in shaping the world we live in.
AG: Agreed. As I mentioned earlier, this idea of micropolitics is very important to my own thinking about culture, politics, and the ranges of engagement poetry's capable of. At the same time, micropolitics can't become a substitute for “broad political movements or opposition,” however absent the latter may seem, but instead needs to be integrated with them. Adolph Reed Jr., has an insightful essay on these issues, entitled, “Why Is There No Black Political Movement?” In it, he defines a political movement as: “a force that has shown a capability, over time, of mobilizing popular support for programs that expressly seek to alter the patterns of public policy or economic relations.” Reed points out that of course people have “daily confrontations” with power; yet these confrontations don't necessarily lead to broad-based social movements nor should they supersede them.
There's a need to constantly revise our notions and language of political intervention in order to keep pace with rapid social and technological change. I wonder if anyone knew at the time that a handful of people refusing to leave a lunch counter would help instigate the massive social upheavals that occupying factories once did. Did the various trade representatives, supported in the streets by global justice protesters, who walked out on the US at the World Trade Organization talks in Cancún last fall signal a decline in US geo-economic hegemony? The multifaceted international resistance to dictated neoliberalism looks like a pretty big movement to me, and one that's making an impact. At the other end of the political spectrum is the organized right, which has definitely influenced recent US social and foreign policy. If Bush is defeated this fall, it will be the result of a political movement to depose him supplementing “regular” Democratic voters. Are the only broad-based political movements ones recognized by the mainstream media?
Again, feminism and related civil rights movements seem to provide a model, one that combines a politics of the everyday with a widespread social politics, including electoral politics. Of course, feminism had to keep adjusting its strategies, ideologies, and language as it own exclusions were called into question by working-class women, minority women, and lesbians. Similarly, I think our own discussion of parenting has to recognize the homophobia in US society that won't allow same-sex couples the general rights, access, or “official” recognition granted to those deemed heterosexual. Being a parent has made me even more aware of choices people make and are not allowed to make — perhaps because being a parent seems like the biggest choice I've ever made, more so than the ongoing choice to be a writer, with its accompanying marginalization, lack of financial recompense, enforced discipline, and solitude (to list some of the less glamorous traits . . . ). And near the top of this list would be the institutions one chooses — consciously or unconsciously — and chooses not to affiliate oneself with.
DS: Shifting gears a bit, what happened between apex of the M and now to change your perception of the poem? Maybe that's not a fair question. We're not static beings. But I remember 10 years ago how transforming that journal was for me. A friend at Powell's Books in Portland came to me with it. Put it in my hands. Said: you have to read this! I think of that journal as a re-articulation of some elements of poetry unacknowledged by the limiting ideologies of Langpo at that time. How do you see apex now? What did you hope to accomplish with it? What worked, or didn't?
AG: I'd always thought that Philip Guston's paintings were produced in three distinct stages: the social realist expressionism of the '30s and '40s; the abstract impressionism of the '50s and '60s; and the intentionally crude, cartoonish figuration of the late '60s and '70s. One of the most interesting aspects of the Michael Auping-curated Guston retrospective is the way it illuminates a lifelong continuity in Guston's work in terms of themes, iconography, technique, palette, politics, etc., as series of paintings draw on prior stages and anticipate future ones. Similarly — and not to compare myself to Guston but to point to how continuity and discontinuity function in all of our work (for instance, the shifts in your poetry between a historicizing approach, a poetics of the everyday, and more recent imagistic and aphoristic transcriptions of thought and experience) — the issue of personal evolution from apex of the M to now is complicated.
I think one could trace a segment of this evolution within apex of the M itself, specifically, its shift from a fragmented lyric mode of address in issue #1 (1994) to a more documentary poetics by the final issue, #6 (1997). In retrospect, it's clear that this trajectory paralleled the intellectual pursuits and developments of its editors (besides myself, Kristin Prevallet, Lew Daly, and Pam Rehm), whether in direct relation to our individual poetic practices or not. While making videos and cataloging the Helen Adam archive at SUNY Buffalo's Poetry / Rare Books Room, Kristin was working in a documentary poetics mode that would culminate with the Parasite Poems and a book you — meaning, Skanky Possum Books — published last year, Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation, and Image-Text Projects . Lew was writing a dissertation on mid-17th-century English Civil War-era peasant revolt, and I was writing a similar type of dissertation on early 19th-century British working-class radical agrarianism and abolitionism. Pam — who of the four of us was the only one not in grad school — was reading social and political history, traces of which bubble beneath the surface of her poetry, however generally apolitical her poetry back then might have otherwise appeared on first read. She was also a new mother at the time. All of this informed our thinking about apex of the M during a relatively brief, three-to-four-year period. The challenge was to keep pushing forward while the Poetics Program at Buffalo, which each of us were affiliated with to a lesser or greater extent, treaded water. This was, although it needn't have been, a somewhat isolating endeavor.
apex of the M created a lot of controversy at the time, which was more the result of the strident editorials — manifestos, really — that led off the first three issues, and less the product of the content that followed (except in one or two cases). At their worst, these editorials called for a political / mystical “base materialist” revolutionary aesthetics (inspired by Georges Bataille's theory of transgression and Michel de Certeau's analysis of mystic speech); they sketched a simplistic relationship between culture, society, and politics (and grossly misunderstood poetry's place in this relationship), and appended to it a mostly conventional notion of literary history; and they painted for censure a somewhat caricatured portrait of Language Poetry. At their best, the editorials called for a contextualizing poetics and criticism (something I'm still very much interested in); they critiqued ahistorical formalism, both in mainstream, workshop verse and experimental poetry (the latter of which has developed its own set of cookie-cutter workshop techniques during the past decade); and they called for a reevaluation of the avant-garde project, which, after nearly a hundred years, seemed to be self-satisfied with, and doctrinaire about, its guiding principles.
As Language Poetry has become more thoroughly institutionalized and even canonized, it has at one level strengthened its position and authority as academic books and conference papers are written about it, while at another level — on more of a “street” level — it's lost much of its immediate impact. This is a fairly standard sequence of events for literary and artistic movements, which I'm not describing here for condemnation. For many younger poets, Language Poetry is almost a prior historical phenomenon, which means they read a couple of the classic texts, learn a few formal tricks to add to their repertoire, and move on; whereas for those of us just a little bit older (early-to-mid '30s), we really wrestled with the issues Language Poetry presented. Which isn't to say that Language Poetry is the only development in recent and contemporary poetry that demands serious attention. In fact, this kind of cultural myopia is exactly what we were trying to challenge with apex of the M , and is an editorial strategy that's been enacted — in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of awareness — by a number of poetry journals since. We tried, especially in the first two or three issues, to present poets we felt had been overshadowed by Language Poetry while working parallel to it. We combined this with a poetic discourse developed in the late '80s around the idea of an “analytic lyric,” formulated most thoroughly in a special issue of Acts (#7, edited by David Levi Strauss and Benjamin Hollander) dedicated to the concept.
It's necessary to remember — as I'm sure you do, since you were there — that in the early '90s many younger poets (even some squarely in the Language Poetry camp) saw a return to the lyric as a feasible response to Language Poetry's alienation effects-derived formalist strategies and its critiques of subjectivity / the subject / lyric ego (which were at times carelessly conflated by the Language Poets, their supporters, and their critics). To a certain extent, apex of the M tried to showcase in its first couple issues an alternative lyric practice. But I think all four editors quickly became dissatisfied with this mode. We also stopped feeling the need to be reactive in our responses to trends in contemporary poetry. Furthermore, the Romantic ideology accompanying lyric practice soon felt a bit too predictably appealing to someone in his early 20s, as I was when I co-founded the journal. Instead, we shifted our focus to the concept of alternative histories and the notion of history from below (again, this was closely connected to each editor's respective investigations into progressive historiography, and, I should mention, the significance of Susan Howe, who was on both my and Lew's dissertation committee [and Kristin's MA thesis committee] — and whose work all four of us read and discussed intently — as well as the influence of the radical Marxist historian Jim Holstun, who chaired both of our dissertation committees). Thus, in later issues of the journal, we tried to articulate a documentary poetics that would begin to examine these ideas concerning the writing of history. (So that gets me up to 1997. A more public record can be found in the critical writings on contemporary poetry I've published since then.)
In retrospect, our effort in the first couple issues to posit lyrical forms and their accompanying poetics as a viable successor to Language Poetry strikes me as apex of the M 's biggest failing, though certainly not its only one. Since we've stopped publishing apex of the M , the discussion in the larger poetry world seems to have shifted toward a desire to synthesize language and lyric, which is, obviously (though I don't know why people won't say it), shorthand for Language Poetry and Iowa School-style mostly bland lyric verse. While the endeavor to break down aesthetic and social boundaries is admirable, and the attempt to be more inclusive certainly noteworthy, it seems to me there's an associated danger of an even greater possibility for exclusions resulting from the creation of a homogenized, middling, and narcissism-prone lyric poetry that with near obliviousness elbows more independent approaches out of the way (while leaving a little room for token inclusions). My social and cultural ideal is a pluralistic and heterogeneous poetry world[s] that respects and creates dialogues within differences without feeling the need to erase or simply pay lip service to them. An optimistic view of the contemporary scene would say that this is the direction in which poetry is headed (I'm inclined to agree with this), whether or not these are its conditions right now.
Transpiring as it did during the mid-to-late '90s, the synthesis of language and lyric can't help but remind me of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council's shift to the right and blurring of boundaries between moderate Democrats and Republicans (along with Tony Blair and the British Labour Party's Clintonesque Third Way), with a similar abandonment of the margins (most dramatically, in Clinton's signing of the Welfare Reform Act, the political and cultural — or karmic, if you like — repercussions of which cost Al Gore the presidency). This isn't to equate one kind of poetry with the left and another with the right, which would be ridiculous and deterministic, but to point to a parallel, but not entirely unrelated, political example. In the poetry world, lyric garners from the synthesis what it imagines to be avant-garde street cred, while language gets a higher profile and further institutional legitimization. Whether it leads to any substantial developments in poetry remains to be seen.
Although I'm the last person to espouse innovation for innovation's sake, as younger writers surely our range of options is wider than synthesizing the trends of previous generations and preexisting schools. Personally, I'm interested not only in alternative modernisms and alternative postmodernisms, but in alternatives to modernism and postmodernism. It seems to me that the most significant and innovative linguistic experiments to have taken place since the late '80s have been in hip hop. A figure like Missy Elliott demolishes distinctions between language and lyric, experimental and mainstream, avant-garde and populist. Her work is on the cutting edge of cultural practice, and yet hugely popular. Outkast are another example. Are Missy Elliott and Outkast postmodernists or avant-gardists? It's kind of an absurd question. They're independent innovators who come from communities fostering of this approach (and who have since been provided with massive resources from the entertainment industry to further realize — and profit from — their visions).
apex of the M 's biggest success was letting people know that they don't have to be a 2nd- or 3rd-generation anything to be an engaged and engaging independent poet. Maybe this is part of what initially attracted you and your friend at Powell's Books to the journal. I've always thought that offering this kind of encouragement was an important part of your own publishing and editorial endeavors. In this sense, how would you describe your evolution from the first issues of Mike and Dale's Younger Poets in relation to your own poetry and your Skanky Possum media empire: magazine, books, chapbooks, website, blog?
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